Comics Time: Wet Moon Book 1: Feeble Wanderings

I’d imagine your tolerance for this book will vary proportionately to your tolerance for goth culture, because it’s definitely about goths. There are a lot of piercings and unusual hairstyles and ripped stockings and purses with little batwings sewn on them. But this strange, slow story about a group of kids at either the Savannah College of Art and Design or a fictional facsimile thereof isn’t your usual po-faced every-day-is-Halloween goth artifact. There’s a sadness and a weakness and a feebleness to everyone’s presentation of themselves as Goths, a recognition that this identity is the result of chipping away at certain surface characteristics until the desired result is achieved but that there can still be any number of chinks in the armor. Cleo and her friends/enemies more or less live in squalor, with pizza boxes and bags of chips and cockroaches strewn hither and yon. They make much of their bodily functions. They always look kind of tired and sickly. None of this is in the glamorous way that goths are supposed to work, either. Indeed the only character who truly appears to have perfected a seamless goth look and lifestyle is treated almost like an alien. And humor deflates the pretension on several occasions (what’s up, punch to the boobs?).

What is glamorous about the book is its recreation of that sense of languid, sexy ennui-bordering-on-mania that afflicts certain types of people in college. Laziness so profound it becomes almost sensual, a constant unspoken sizing-up of your fellow young people as sexual objects, a feeling that, despite being surrounded by like-minded individuals in a setting expressly designed to stimulate the exchange of ideas, you’re alone with your thoughts. This is essentially the storyline, but it’s best expressed through Campbell’s art itself. His women are extremely sexy in the way his lush line sort of idealizes their imperfections, and his dudes ain’t so shabby either, but they all have this slightly slackjawed, tired-eyed look of being dazed. Campbell frequently frames them awkwardly within their panels, using the surrounding space to suggest that they’re always a little lost, which is sort of the point.

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Everything I Do

Hi! My name is Sean T. Collins and I am a writer. Here are links to basically every place on the internet where you can find what I do. A site for everything and everything on its site, that’s my motto. Non-tumblrs up top, tumblrs down below.

All Leather Must Be Boiled: News and views on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, located at boiledleather.com. Home of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, co-hosted by Stefan Sasse. Of all my tumblrs this is where you’ll find the widest range of posts, as I often rope in pretty much anything I’m thinking and writing about television, fiction, fantasy, genre storytelling, politics, whatever. Beneath the gold, the bitter steel.

The True Black: Comics written by me and drawn by a host of talented collaborators. Also contains news of upcoming comics projects.

Bowie Loves Beyoncé: You can’t say no to the beauty and the beast, darling. Images of two of the best human beings and popular musicians, David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. This was my first tumblr, so it’s what shows up when I like your posts.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts: No man with a good t-shirt needs to be justified. Good pictures of our greatest garment.

Superheroes Lose: Superhero publishers love putting pictures of their superheroes losing on the covers of their comics. I love putting them on this tumblr. When we imagine people who can do anything, this is what we imagine.

Badge: Stories of police brutality, overkill, and overreach in the United States of America, reblogged from around the internet with minimal comment. Before they bring the curtain down.

The Deep Ones: There’s something in the water. Sea monsters real, extinct, and imaginary. Co-founded and co-curated by me and Julia Gfrörer.

The Devil in Love: A man of wealth and taste. Images of the infernal with undeniable aesthetic and/or erotic appeal. Founded by Julia, co-curated by me.

Homage to Catalonia: Images of churches on fire or in ruins as a means by which to contemplate the positive and negative energy generated by the buildings and realized in the flames. Founded by me, co-curated by Julia.

Comics Democracy: Comics with over 10,000 notes on tumblr, found while tumbling and reblogged without comment. I will show you a world without gatekeepers.

Cool Practice: What I wanted to be and how I wanted to be it, one song at a time. Thoughts on music and its intersection with “coolness.”

Sean T. Collins on Comics: A repository for writing about comics (mostly comics on the web, mostly alternative-genre comics at that) for my former day job, this tumblr will also sometimes reblog writing-about-comics I’ve done elsewhere.

Sean T. Collins on Culture: The twin of seantcomics, this tumblr houses my old dayjob writing on genre culture that influenced me as a kid. Who knows what I’ll get up to with it eventually?

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour: A dedicated tumblr for my ASoIaF/GoT podcast, created for iTunes syndication purposes, but hey, you can follow it if you want.

In addition, I created several one-off tumblrs to host individual webcomics written by me and drawn by other people. I plan to reblog all of them to The True Black eventually, but here they are in their native habitats: